White Paper

Swansea Improves Document Management With Open Source ECM

As a fast moving organization specializing in property
management and real estate development, Swansea
Housing Association knew it needed a new system for
managing content. The Association develops and
manages over $200 million in property and real estate
and works with planners, architects, and public
administration officials over the course of several
projects. As you can expect, Swansea generates an
overwhelming amount of documentation.

As documents made their way through their various
stages of the lifecycle (from draft to reviewed to
approved to archived), employees and those outside
the company collaborated on and shared these
documents via unsecured email. However, due to the
difficulty in managing and manually tracking these
documents, Swansea employees often found they had
the incorrect version of a document or the discussions
and decisions associated with an earlier version had
been deleted or lost.

Swansea Housing Association's other problem revolved
around their existing collaborative platform – Lotus
Notes – which provided a cumbersome and limiting
environment for defining workflows that facilitated the
lifecycle management of the documents. A workflow
stipulates how the document proceeds through its
lifecycle and who has authority to review, change, and
approve it.

For Swansea, Lotus Notes allowed only two types of
users, "administrators" and "authors," significantly
limiting their ability to collaborate and securely control
access. Moreover, to change a workflow meant they
had to call in an outside programmer, an expensive and
time-consuming procedure. And, for each new project,
Swansea essentially had to start over from scratch
because Notes did not allow them to reuse
configurations from earlier projects.